Awakening Our Humanity

For the first time ever, all services and rituals of Easter and Passover season were canceled—attention was focused on the crisis of the global coronavirus pandemic.  People sheltered in their homes, some watched virtual services on computers and TVs.      …...It felt empty.

We are embroiled in a world pandemic; thousands have died and more will follow.  This is a tragedy beyond reckoning . . . but history of the world shows that out of tragedy there often arises unexpected good.

I have seen signs of an awakening of our humanity.  People reaching out to help others: doctors and nurses volunteering to leave their homes and go to help where the need is greatest; first responders knowingly walking into danger; people in apartment buildings cheering together from their windows the efforts of those facing the danger; healthy people singing and dancing from a distance to cheer up their neighbors; children finding ways to raise money to help strangers; homebound folks making face masks to distribute to nursing homes and shelters; random groups distributing food to those financially challenged by job loss . . . These are people helping people, not for profit or personal gain but because there is a need.  Isn’t this what we are supposed to be about?

In our fast-paced competitive world we have over-valued the material side of life while under-valuing—often ignoring—the spiritual dimension of our reality.  The spiritual dimension is not substantive but ethereal (without weight or measure) . . . the consciousness that is present only in humanity: love, compassion, empathy, hope, dreams, ideas, creativity, inventiveness . . . qualities that define our uniqueness and the very essence of our humanity.

I’ve longed for some unexpected good to come from this tragedy and I see it in the kindness, compassion, and thoughtfulness that is daily emerging.  Perhaps we needed to be slowed down to allow it to shine forth.  This world-wide viral attack shows us the oneness of our small planet, what harms any part harms the whole.  Man made boundaries no longer apply in a world with international transportation and communication.  We are at the point in history which requires our acknowledgement of our One World—our survival depends on it.

A quote from Martin Luther King:  ‘We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

And from a book by Kathleen Duffy titled: Teilhard’s Struggle ‘An evolutionary worldview implies that the cosmos is still unfinished and that its future depends on Human activity . . . the advance of Humanity’s movement in the direction of spirit depends critically on Human endeavor’ . . . not fleeing the world to commune with God but plunging into the World at its deepest and most violent.

Humanity has a purpose--we are here to build a better world.

One World

Just as the human body is a whole in which damage to any part is shared by the whole; our World is a functioning unit where damage to any part is shared by the whole.  Recently the whole world has been damaged by the coronavirus.  If we can find anything positive coming out of this global pandemic where we have shared fear and loss, I hope it brings a greater awareness of our One World.

Only recently has humanity become aware of the reality of our world as a singular unit—it has always been treated as if it were made up of separate parts.  The first time the curvature of the planet was observed was in 1935 when an explorer balloon observed the earth’s spherical horizon.  In 1946 the first pictures of the curvature appeared.  The most famous picture of all time was taken in a rocket  traveling to the moon on December 7, 1972—the stunning picture of one tiny Blue Marble drifting in the vastness of space; one single whole unit on which everything we have ever known resides.   We have come to revere that picture; but have we yet understood its’ meaning?  This is one world, one singular complete unit, sustained by the delicately balanced interaction of its many parts—and humanity is one of those parts.

For thousands of years of human history, the earth’s complexity and vital interactions were not realized or understood, so its wholeness was separated into pieces.  Those generations can be excused, they didn’t know.

Looking to the long past we see a slow gathering of groups of people from tribes to villages to cities, until the groups became Nations which laid claim to land areas and fought wars to hold or expand their ‘piece’.  National Resources, earth’s gift to humanity, were claimed and privatized for profit by states, special groups and corporations or occasional individuals.  The air and waterways were  polluted in the name of progress as industrialization swept the globe.  Species were carelessly extinguished for profit and pleasure—all because of a ‘piecemeal’ focus while failing to recognize the earth’s reliance on its interdependent functioning.

In the half century since that photo of our ‘blue planet’ appeared, we should have become cognizant of our world’s wholeness and awakened to the realization of its delicate balance and that we—humanity is part of it.  We should all be seriously taking steps to mend the sundering, not withdrawing from peace and climate accords!

It will take generations to end the warring, and learn to share the planet and its’ resources, but it has been given to This generation that it begins to move in that direction.   We may look at the acrimoniousness in today’s world and say ‘it’s not possible’—but look back some 80 years and  see the bitter fighting between Germany and Japan against Great Britain and America in WWII and realize they are now all allies.  

My point of writing this is that the coronavirus is awakening us the reality of One World.  We will get through the suffering, with painful losses to be sure, but I pray it awakens us to the only way we can save ourselves from ourselves—by seeing our wholeness.